Giant roundup: 146 Intel and AMD processors!

Dealing with current news means that we rarely have the opportunity to review old products and of course a comparison between the most recent products and those that came out several years ago can get a little problematic. But we’ve decided to push the boat out and take as exhaustive a look as possible at the Intel and AMD processor offer spanning the last five years.

To be included in the report, processors had to fulfil several criteria, the first being (we had to limit things somewhere) that they’re all dual core. Secondly, as our most recent test protocol is 64-bit, the processors had to be capable of functioning in this mode, which excluded the old Core Duo using Mobile architecture.

After weeks of benchmarking, we can now give you 1752 results across the 12 applications in our test protocol with no less than 146 processors!

The test

For this test, we used the protocol we brought in for the Core i5 test. As you’ll remember if you’ve had a look at that test, we took advantage of the availability of the final version of Windows 7 to revamp the protocol. The OS first then, we’re now using a 64-bit version of Windows 7, which means that all software available in 64-bit mode is tested in this mode.

We have taken the opportunity to update the software, which means 3ds max is now tested in version 2010, Min GW and WinRAR (3.8 up to 3.9) have been updated, as have After Effects (CS3 up to CS4) and Nuendo (4.2 up to 4.3). The VirtualDub/DiVX combos and AutoMKV/x264 have been replaced by Avidemux/x264 and MainConcept Reference/H.264, while the test files of virtually all the tests have changed or been modified (higher rendering resolution for example).

In terms of games, we've decided to retain Crysis 1.2 and its ultra-heavy CPU test but to retire World In Conflict and replace it with more recent and demanding games: Arma 2, Grand Theft Auto IV and Anno 1404 join the protocol. So as to show up processor differences to a maximum, we set all graphics options to a max to load right up, at the same time as limiting resolution to 800*600 to eliminate any smoothing due to the power of the mono-GPU solution used on the test configuration.